Saddam knew what Bush was up to, and responded by taking tens of thousands of European human shields and placing them at military facilities around Iraq. This was a huge problem for Bush, as it wrecked his strategy.

What people generally don’t know is that two of Bush’s biggest enemies in Texas – oil man Oscar Wyatt and former governor John Connally traveled to Baghdad and worked out some sort of deal with Saddam to get him to release the hostages. That is what made it possible for Bush to bomb Iraq. Bush of course never gave credit to Wyatt or Connolly, and I don’t know why they did it, or why Saddam agreed.

HOUSTON, Oct. 18 – Billions of dollars of Iraqi oil had been sold under a United Nations program – and food and other goods bought with the proceeds – when Saddam Hussein decided in 2000 that he personally wanted a bigger cut of the action. Documents now suggest that at least one United States company acceded to that demand, paying surcharges that kept the oil flowing.

The action by the Coastal Corporation, which was founded by the Texas entrepreneur and oilman Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., is detailed in a formal Iraqi government tally of secret payments made from September 2000 to December 2003, when steps were taken by American and British officials to stop the surcharges.

Coastal, the only publicly traded American oil company on the list, is shown as having paid $201,877 in surcharges. It is a small piece of the $228 million in surcharges on oil sales that Mr. Hussein collected, largely from Russian companies, according to a Central Intelligence Agency report released last week.

Mr. Wyatt, a former drill-bit salesman in South Texas who built a hydra-headed energy empire, said through a spokeswoman Monday that he had no knowledge of Coastal’s paying any surcharges. A spokeswoman for the El Paso Corporation, which acquired Coastal in 2001, declined to comment, citing a grand jury subpoena the company received from a federal court in New York.
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A subject I have never studied, and I live biking distance from the South Fork ‘set’ (or ranch as it is or was called) in Parker, Texas. At the time, the ‘North Dallas rich set’ was all agog over the series; some of us not so much.

Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog
OILMAN OSCAR WYATT REVEALS HOW HIS WORLD REALLY WORKS—FROM FREEING THE HOSTAGES IN IRAQ TO DOING DEALS WITH CHINA AND KEEPING UP WITH HIS JET-SET MARRIAGE.
by JAN JARBOE RUSSELL
APRIL 1991

On a black January night just six days after American jets began bombing Iraq, Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr., the 66-year-old bad boy of the Texas oil and gas industry, faced more than 1,100 well-heeled civic leaders in Corpus Christi and dropped a bomb of his own. “As many of you know, Governor Connally and I went to Baghdad last month to talk Saddam Hussein into releasing the hostages,” a grim-faced Wyatt told his audience. “We became convinced that Saddam did not want war. He knows he can’t win. He stated he knew he couldn’t win. In the end, nobody can win.”

That was not a prediction anyone in the audience at the annual chamber of commerce dinner wanted to hear. The enormous banquet hall in the Bayfront Plaza Convention Center was a vision of patriotic splendor. Guests at the head table, including Corpus Christi mayor Betty Turner and the officers of the chamber board, sat in front of a huge American flag. Above the audience, clusters of red, white, and blue balloons flew from the ceiling. The crowd was unusually large. Many were drawn there to hear Wyatt, who in early December had pulled off an extraordinary act of personal diplomacy. He and John Connally had flown to Baghdad, met with Saddam Hussein, and negotiated the freedom of all foreign hostages held in Iraq.

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Wyatt does not mention that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was one of the *first* in the ‘stream’ of noted celebrities (in the words of Joe Wilson from his book linked above) who showed up in Iraq to plea with Saddam Hussein.

Looks like there was a long ‘stream’ of people were in on this ‘mugging for cameras’ and the press, looking to get noticed, while pleading with Hussein on behalf of a number of other persons and people …